


The Singular Death of Mr. Arrow

by allthegoodnamesaretakendammit



Category: Disney (All Media Types), Treasure Planet
Genre: Alien physiology, Fix-it fic, Gen, Worldbuilding, extremely misleading depictions of scientific anomalies, functional immortality, life uh finds a way, secret cyborg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 01:54:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13940064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit/pseuds/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit
Summary: When the Etherium closes a sail, it opens a porthole.





	The Singular Death of Mr. Arrow

 

When he laid down and listened to the stillness of his own mind, Mr. Arrow would remember it: the immense drag of gravity, the feeling of being flung overboard, and then being sucked past the event horizon as if he were as light as stardust. Staring down into that enormous black disc—huge and gaping, like falling into the eye of a giant. He’d thought it was the end of him. The final chapter in a long life of duty and discipline.

But it wasn’t.

Lying back on his bed of stone, here, at the heart of the singularity, it was easy to look back on it all and say that his semi-forced retirement seemed to be at the universe’s own request. It was peaceful here, and his grandmother had raised him to appreciate peacefulness anywhere he could get it. The tidal forces at the lip of the black hole pulled debris this way and that in an ever-expanding galactic hurricane, but Mr. Arrow’s body was not one that could be crushed. Starved, drowned, or suffocated—yes. But not folded into itself by gravity. His bones were made of Arcturian’s volcanic marrow; his heart, replaced with Cygnian steel some ten years previous. To say nothing of having star-stone for skin.

It was just like him to die in the only way that wouldn’t actually kill him.

And it was just like Mr. Scroop to kill him in the only way that wouldn’t stick. Mr. Scroop couldn’t do a proper job of anything, even murder. Marooning him here, on this anti-world. A cesspool of ethereal refuse, the Captain would call it.

He would think of her and that disreputable crew, and he’d worry. Then he’d remember just who he was thinking about. The Captain needed no one’s worry, no one’s meddling. She’d return home with her arms full of bundled treasures, place a few fossa flowers on his grandmother’s grave for him, and go on with her life. As she should. There was always more to life than what we’ve left behind. Mr. Arrow believed that, and not just because he had to.

As a spacer, there was a part of him that was infinitely curious about his new home. It was no wormhole, no gateway to the familiar fixtures of his galaxy. And yet, it was a prosperous place all the same: a ring of fire brimming at every far corner of the sky, an endless deluge of new debris, and the miracle of breathable air—a microcosm of the Etherium from which this place had emerged. The center of the singularity was a surface unto itself: a planet, mid-birth. A shifting mass under his feet of matter forming and reforming like desert sand in a thousand different colors, of a hundred thousand unnamed substances. Yet it was almost always firm enough to stand on and in the the densest places, soil had emerged. And shortly after, a young forest to make good use of it.

Time moved differently here. What else could explain the way life had already taken hold in a black hole only a few months old? There was bacteria helping the soil along, plants that ate pulverized asteroids for breakfast, and Mr. Arrow himself. Living, quite literally, in the last place anyone would think to look for him.

He owed his life to a sachet of fossa seeds that he had kept on him for sentimentality’s sake, as it was the last vestige of his grandmother’s garden. It had proved its worth tenfold. He could eat its flowers for breakfast, chew its stem and leaves for lunch, and roast its roots for dinner. Fire was truly a marvel here: eating as much oxygen as you would give it, sparking suddenly in the presence of dust from ruined planets, purpling in the presence of fossa spores. Soon now, Mr. Arrow would convince himself to test the edibility of the singularity’s two dozen types of flora. But tonight, he was content with his roots. He sat and chewed slowly, watching the trees sway in the riptide of gravity.

Already, his seeds had hybridized with the locals: producing a myriad of weeds whose roots forked through super-dense rock and shifting stellar sands. Its cousins were trees whose branches were stiff enough to simply stir in the tidal crush of the singularity. And those tides were constant. The air was never still, but Mr. Arrow was happy just to have air at all. When he woke again, he would walk the whole of this world, always with a firm grip on a fissure in the rock or a tree limb, counting his paces to take measure of it. This morning, it had been mile in diameter and expanding all the time. It was like watching a child grow: faster than you could believe, but undeniable all the same. Something to be proud of even though it made you feel old. Ancient, even. It awed him, the thought that he was the oldest living thing here.

And so he named the world. This shrub is brunflos, those rocks are lapis-vitae, and that flower is luxfolio. And this place? Home.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Liberties were taken with science, as well as with Latin. Many thanks to my beta, cupstealer. Ya got sharp eyes, girl.


End file.
